A Post-Racial Lynch Mob

Even after the Duke lacrosse case, Texaco executives allegedly using the N-word in private meetings -- which turned out to be "St. Nicholas" -- the Tawana Brawley case, not to mention virtual hailstorms of racist graffiti and nooses materializing on college campuses, all of which invariably end up having been put there by the alleged victims, the Non-Fox Media (NFM) didn't even pause before conjuring a racist plot in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Florida last month.

Like Captain Ahab searching for the Great White Whale, the NFM is constantly on the hunt for proof of America as "Mississippi Burning."

Over St. Patrick's Day weekend, the month after Martin was killed, gangs in Chicago shot 10 people dead, including a 6-year-old girl, Aliyah Shell, who was sitting with her mother on their front porch.

One imagines MSNBC hosts heaving a sign of relief that little Aliyah was not shot by a white man, and was thus spared the horror of being a victim of racism.

As it happens, Trayvon Martin wasn't shot by a white man either, but by George Zimmerman, a mixed-race Hispanic who lives in a diverse (47 percent white) gated community and tutors black kids.

But Hispanic is close enough for the NFM. They're chasing the Great White Whale of racist America and don't have time to check to see if the whale is actually a guppy.

Since the cat leapt out of the bag on Zimmerman being Hispanic, the media have begun calling him a "white Hispanic."

Not being a race-obsessed liberal, I don't particularly care, but it's indisputable that Zimmerman is brown. I saw his face carved on the side of a Mayan temple in the Yucatan. Using his mother's maiden name, he would be admitted to the University of Michigan law school on a full scholarship.

Apart from that, pretty much all that is known with certainty is that Zimmerman called the police to report a suspicious character in his neighborhood, and shortly thereafter he shot and killed Martin.

On the basis of little else, the media conjured a Hollywood script: A "white" man was "stalking" a little black kid -- who could be Obama's son! -- confronted him, beat him senseless as the small black child screamed for help, and finally shot the kid dead, "just because he was black."

Two weeks of nonstop hysteria later, it turns out that every part of that gripping plot is based on nothing that could be called a reasonable assumption, much less a fact.